I can confidently say from my experience with fitness that the motivation to have a healthy body should not be based on fear, but on love. One of the hardest negative mental habits to break is the constant need for the approval of others. This habit can propel us to physical and emotional abuse, as happened to me, by over training our bodies to be accepted and complimented by others. The more I abused my body at the gym, the more people praised me, and the more I was motivated to keep doing it, to the extent that I even signed up for competition shows. As you can see, this was not that different from a drug addiction. My lack of self-respect and self-love was great enough to keep me open to doing anything that gave me that “approval-acceptance” high.